The Facebook page described itself as "a collaborative art
project open to interpretation." Here is the page's description:

No hate speech please.

This is a page dedicated to showing both sides of modern
day beauty.

In current societal fashion, arecent trending surge of "pro-obesity" and
"fat acceptance" have paved the way for many people to renounce
exercise and personal healthcare in general. This page aims to
only show that being skinny is okay as well! Skinnyshaming is not
okay :)

We have emailed the creators in
order to better ascertain what their idea of "skinnyshaming" is
and how it relates to the fat acceptance movement and will update
when we hear back.

Operation Harpoon also had an Instagram account under its former
name, Project Harpoon, which has also since been deleted. (A
previous version of this post showed embedded photos from both
the Facebook and Instagram pages, but those are no longer
available.)

Despite those deletions, though, the questionable movement is
still going strong on a subreddit called /r/thinnerbeauty,
which has a similar mission statement, claiming that its aim is
to "provide people with achievable health goals."

"We do this by showing how beautiful they could look if they put
just a little bit of effort into their bodies," the subreddit's
sidebar reads.

On a new thread,
Reddit users discuss Facebook and Instagram's apparent
deletion of the Operation/Project Harpoon pages.

Despite requests on the subreddit for people to steer clear of
"hate speech," there are plenty of slurs and some warped
ideas expressed.

For example, at the top of the subreddit is a video entitled,
"Quick photoshop tutorial on how to make landwhales look human."
"Landwhale" is Reddit's juvenile slang for an overweight person.
(It follows that Operation Harpoon's name is a reference to
this term.)

The community's edits of model Tess Holliday actually
elicited a response from her.

"It's abominable that this [Facebook page] is using my image
without permission to promote themselves,"
Holliday told E! Online. "This kind of hit piece is exactly
why
I started #effyourbeautystandards. I am asking my followers
to boycott this [page] and any others like it. Loving yourself is
the most powerful message we all need to stand behind."

These insensitivities don't seem to be having any concrete
effects on the online plus-size fashion and fat
acceptance community though. By
many accounts, it's
thriving — and even breaking into the mainstream.